Nina Bawden

Nina Bawden, who has died aged 87, wrote novels for children and adults in
which she explored the emotional landscape of the middle-class family as
social mores shifted in the course of the 20th century.

Her most celebrated work was Carrie’s War, which describes the travails and adventures of a young brother and sister evacuated to Wales during the Second World War. As they settle into their new life in a mining town, the children unravel the network of relationships underpinning the family that shelters them, a network they only fully understand on returning to the community as adults.

The book, like all Nina Bawden’s best writing, made use of her own life. For her fiction was draped with characters “like ventriloquists dummies”, which put her own point of view, clinically dissecting suburban domesticity. It was this desire completely to mine her own experience that led her, from 1963, to write a children’s book one year and an adult novel the next. It was, she said, “a useful and satisfyingly real way of working, making use of all my life, all memory, wasting nothing”.

The initial impulse to write for children, she once explained, had come after she found herself depressed by the books her sons were reading, with their “wooden characters uninvolved in any reality I recognised. I think I wanted to give my children something that would encourage them to feel they could make a difference to what happened in the world.”

Her books for adults also partook of this same broad political positivism, differentiating her from many female writers of her generation, who tended to dwell on the victimisation of women. In contrast Laura, the novelist and central character in Walking Naked (1981), may speak for Nina Bawden when she says: “I write because I am afraid of life.” Bawden admitted that writing was how she stood up for herself against this fear; she was, she said, taking the fight to God.

Nina Mary Mabey was born in Essex on January 19 1925, the daughter of Charles Mabey, a marine engineer, and his wife Ellaline, a teacher. She did not know until she was 50 that her father, who was away at sea for most of her childhood, had actually been born Mario Angelo Bennati. She spent her childhood with her mother and two younger brothers at Goodmayes, Essex, and during the war was evacuated to Wales with Ilford County High School for Girls, to which she had won a scholarship.

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She won another scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, where she switched from French to read PPE. There she went out to tea with the 17-year-old Richard Burton, then an RAF cadet on a two-term short course, and “would have flirted more enthusiastically if it had not been for the horrid boils on the back of his neck”.

She spent evenings on firewatch with her fellow student Margaret Thatcher (then Margaret Roberts), whom she remembered as “a plump, neat, solemn girl with rosy cheeks who spoke as if she’d just emerged from an elocution lesson”. Nina Bawden, politicised by her time as an evacuee in working class Wales, had joined the University Labour Club, and was shocked that Margaret Roberts had joined the Conservatives.

“I told her she and I, with our lower middle-class backgrounds, had been lucky to get to Oxford, and it would be despicable to use our good fortune simply to join the ranks of the privileged. Also, Labour was more fun. And she said, of course at the moment the Labour Club was more fashionable, but that suited her purposes. Unlike me, she said, she wasn’t 'playing’ at politics. She meant to get into Parliament and there was more chance of being noticed in the Conservative Club just because the other members were dull and stodgy.”

Nina Bawden left Oxford wanting to be a foreign correspondent. She was offered a job as a trainee reporter on the Manchester Evening News, but instead got married to Henry (Harry) Bawden. He had flown spotter planes for the Army during the war, and seemed reassuringly mature to the 19-year-old Nina. Her fellow student Kenneth Tynan, who had read the one story she had published at Oxford in a small literary magazine called Mandrake, told her that writers should never marry, they should devote their lives to art; but she thought him silly.

Her father, working in Glasgow, called on the Bawden family, only to face accusations that Nina was gold-digging. One prospective in-law remarked: “You know there’s money in the family? Harry will have £30,000 when his mother dies.” In fact, when Harry himself went to see his widowed mother, he found her dead with her head in the gas oven, and all her financial documents laid out on the kitchen table. She had been worried about what the young couple would live on.

Nina Bawden worked for a time for the Town and Country Planning Association, but she stayed at home as a full-time mother after her two sons were born and started to write a novel. This was the thriller Who Calls the Tune, about the relationship between incestuous twins — one (the girl) with a wooden leg. Collins Crime Club paid her an advance of £75 and published the book in 1953. After her second crime novel, The Odd Flamingo (1954), the critic Maurice Richardson wrote that “her doom-laden puddings could do with a pinch of salt” — advice she admitted she took to heart.

She dropped the crime novel genre, adapting some of its techniques to the unravelling of family relationships behind the net curtains of suburban middle-class households. Despite the shift, most of her adult books retain the kind of atmospherics used by such masters of the thriller as Graham Greene or Eric Ambler.

Of her many novels, Afternoon of the Good Woman (1976) won the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year, and Circles of Deceit was shortlisted for the 1987 Booker Prize. Her book for children based on her mother’s rural Norfolk childhood, The Peppermint Pig, won the Guardian Award in 1976. Circles of Deceit was televised, starring Edward Fox, and Carrie’s War was twice filmed by the BBC. Her 1956 novel The Solitary Child was also filmed. In 1996 her Granny the Pag was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

Other novels (of a total numbering around 50) include Change Here for Babylon (1955); Devil by the Sea (1953); A Woman of My Age (1967); The Birds on the Trees (1970); Anna Apparent (1972); George Beneath a Paper Moon (1974); Familiar Passions (1979); and Family Money (1991). Her books for children included The Secret Passage (1963); A Handful of Thieves (1967); The Robbers (1979); The Finding (1985); and The Outside Child (1989).

Nina Bawden never lost the sense of public dutifulness she expressed as an undergraduate to the future Lady Thatcher — a sense that she had been fortunate and that she had a duty to contribute to society. She was nominated by Labour as a JP in Surrey in 1967, and served as a magistrate until 1976, when she moved to London. She became ambivalent about the justice system because of the treatment of her eldest son, a diagnosed schizophrenic who served six months in prison for a drugs offence. Some years later he killed himself at the age of 34.

Nina Bawden served on the committees of PEN, the Society of Authors, and the Royal Society of Literature. She was also president of the Society of Women Writers and Journalists. For many years she was a reviewer for The Daily Telegraph.

She was appointed CBE in 1995.

She married her second husband, Austen Kark, in 1954. He became managing director of the BBC’s External Services and they had a daughter. They divided their time between homes in London and in Greece.

On May 10 2002 Nina Bawden and her husband were on the 12.45 train from King’s Cross to Cambridge which flew off the rails and slammed into the station canopy at Potter’s Bar. Austen Kark was one of seven people killed in the accident and Nina Bawden herself was badly injured, with a smashed ankle and broken arm, leg, collarbone and ribs. She spent several months in hospital before emerging deaf in one ear and unable to walk without a stick. Dear Austen (2006), her last book, was a powerful and poignant letter to her husband in which she sought to make sense of the tragedy and explained how she found herself becoming a spokesperson for survivors of the crash.

Nina Bawden is survived by a son and by two stepdaughters. A son and daughter predeceased her.